Tuesday, January 31, 2006

SMS The Next Marketing Frontier

Tout Media, Inc., a behavioral marketing firm, recently partnered with CellIt Marketing, LLC., a marketing technology company, to leverage their combined expertise to offer cutting-edge marketing opportunities to local and national advertisers.

Recent studies have shown that text messaging is up nearly 280% in the last two years and is expected to grow to 220 billion messages a year by 2008. And, more people have cell phones than have Internet access. (but what happens they have both?)

These types of statistics make it easy to understand why companies like Procter & Gamble, Microsoft and VISA USA have all become actively involved in the formation and development of mobile marketing as a new medium.

The point that I was making as a representative of Tout Media is that in order to effectively utilize mobile marketing and SMS as a tool to enhance customer relationships, one should be careful. I am basing this off of the assumption that mobile marketing is all permission based and therefore not a tool for soliciting new business as much as it is for increasing product awareness and maintaining customer relationships. This is the delicate part - it is important to keep in touch with your customers enough so that they don't feel neglected or unimportant and at the same time keeping enough distance so that you don't become annoying to your customers and risk spoiling the relationship you have built. As Vangorilla said, at that point you would have been better off not communicating with them at all.

As for CellIt Marketing, you are right, they have developed a user interface that makes it easy for anyone to set up and manage the data that is being exchanged between advertiser and consumer. That does not mean that there is not any thought required for gaining the customers permission, delivering useful messages and maintaining the client relationship.

Actually, Cellit's tools are quite good at managing the mechanics of text messaging. I run a campaign through them and they automatically limit the number of messages i can send to any subscriber. Also, they do double opt-ins for certain carriers and single opt-ins for others, per their individual requirements. I don't even have to think about it.. it just works.

If i were running a larger campaign, I would like some more help planning my marketing. I can see where some guidance would help here. I mean, just plastering "Text BOOKS to 99333" isn't going to get a lot of subscribers. I think the key is offering something useful (or a contest) as an incentive to sign up. We, for instance, offered VIP access to a book signing we were having for every subscriber that showed their phone. It seemed to increase our subscribership quite a bit.